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      Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Yesterday - 20:40 · 1 minute

    A promotional image for Sorry for Your Loss, with Elizabeth Olsen

    Enlarge / A promotional image for Sorry for Your Loss , which was a Facebook Watch original scripted series. (credit: Facebook )

    Last April, Meta revealed that it would no longer support original shows, like Jada Pinkett Smith's Red Table Talk talk show, on Facebook Watch. Meta's streaming business that was once viewed as competition for the likes of YouTube and Netflix is effectively dead now; Facebook doesn't produce original series, and Facebook Watch is no longer available as a video-streaming app.

    The streaming business' demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs. However, recently unsealed court documents in an antitrust suit against Meta [ PDF ] claim that Meta has squashed its streaming dreams in order to appease one of its biggest ad customers: Netflix.

    Facebook allegedly gave Netflix creepy privileges

    As spotted via Gizmodo , a letter was filed on April 14 in relation to a class-action antitrust suit that was filed by Meta customers, accusing Meta of anti-competitive practices that harm social media competition and consumers. The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix's founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case. The original complaint filed in December 2020 [ PDF ] doesn’t mention Netflix beyond stating that Facebook “secretly signed Whitelist and Data sharing agreements” with Netflix, along with “dozens” of other third-party app developers. The case is still ongoing.

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      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · 3 days ago - 18:13 edit

    Portugal's data regulator has ordered Sam Altman's iris-scanning project Worldcoin to stop collecting biometric data for 90 days, it said on Tuesday, in the latest regulatory blow to a venture that has raised privacy concerns in multiple countries. From a report: Worldcoin encourages people to have their faces scanned by its "orb" devices, in exchange for a digital ID and free cryptocurrency. More than 4.5 million people in 120 countries have signed up, according to Worldcoin's website. Portugal's data regulator, the CNPD, said there was a high risk to citizens' data protection rights, which justified urgent intervention to prevent serious harm. More than 300,000 people in Portugal have provided Worldcoin with their biometric data, the CNPD said.

    Read more of this story at Slashdot.

    Portugal Orders Altman's Worldcoin To Halt Data Collection
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      GM stops sharing driver data with brokers amid backlash

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 7 days ago - 20:23

    Scissors cut off a stream of data from a toy car to a cloud

    Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

    After public outcry, General Motors has decided to stop sharing driving data from its connected cars with data brokers. Last week, news broke that customers enrolled in GM's OnStar Smart Driver app have had their data shared with LexisNexis and Verisk .

    Those data brokers in turn shared the information with insurance companies, resulting in some drivers finding it much harder or more expensive to obtain insurance. To make matters much worse, customers allege they never signed up for OnStar Smart Driver in the first place, claiming the choice was made for them by salespeople during the car-buying process.

    Now, in what feels like an all-too-rare win for privacy in the 21st century, that data-sharing deal is no more.

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      Murdoch’s journalists unlawfully targeted Meghan and Diana, court told

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 21 March - 19:39

    Prince Harry’s lawyers claim he has experienced a lifetime of ‘overwhelming intrusion’ from newspapers owned by media mogul

    Journalists at Murdoch-owned newspapers “unlawfully targeted” the Duchess of Sussex more than two decades after accessing the private pager messages of Diana, Princess of Wales, the legal team for Prince Harry has told the high court in London.

    In the latest development in Harry’s war against the tabloid press, his lawyers argued he had experienced a lifetime of “overwhelming intrusion” from Murdoch-owned newspapers – with one example cited relating to an article written when he was nine.

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      When fame and medical privacy clash: Kate and other crises of confidentiality

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 20 March - 16:55

    The Princess of Wales is the latest person in the public eye to find there are questions about the security of their health history

    Medical records are meant to be sacred, the preserve of the dedicated professionals treating a patient, but the Princess of Wales is not the first to find herself at the centre of allegations that they have been plundered for gossip.

    The former prime minister Gordon Brown told the Leveson inquiry into media conduct that he believed a story in the Sun about his son Fraser’s diagnosis with cystic fibrosis in 2006 could only have come from leaked medical records.

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      Yes, TikTok sucks. But the rules for tech giants must be better than 'it’s only bad if China does it' | Samantha Floreani

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 19 March - 14:00

    Such blinkered focus on TikTok as the bad guy of the internet derails a much more pressing task

    What year is it? All this talk of a TikTok ban makes it feel like 2020 again.

    But this time it might eventuate. Last week the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would require TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell to a US company or face a national “ban” . Time will tell if it will pass the Senate, but this is the closest the US has come to a national ban since Donal Trump floated the idea four years ago.

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      Millions more in cash needed to fund UK’s open-banking watchdog

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 17 March - 12:06

    Exclusive: £10m needed for regulator charged with developing tools to thwart financial crime and protect consumers

    Banks are under pressure to stump up millions of pounds in interim funding for the organisation that polices open banking , with regulators saying the new money is needed to prevent financial crime and protect consumers if things “go wrong”.

    Large banks including NatWest, HSBC, Lloyds and Santander UK were among more than 40 City firms summoned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) last week to discuss a cash injection into Open Banking Limited (OPL), the body that oversees innovation in this area.

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      Hackers can read private AI assistant chats even though they’re encrypted

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 14 March - 12:30 · 1 minute

    Hackers can read private AI assistant chats even though they’re encrypted

    Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

    AI assistants have been widely available for a little more than a year, and they already have access to our most private thoughts and business secrets. People ask them about becoming pregnant or terminating or preventing pregnancy, consult them when considering a divorce, seek information about drug addiction, or ask for edits in emails containing proprietary trade secrets. The providers of these AI-powered chat services are keenly aware of the sensitivity of these discussions and take active steps—mainly in the form of encrypting them—to prevent potential snoops from reading other people’s interactions.

    But now, researchers have devised an attack that deciphers AI assistant responses with surprising accuracy. The technique exploits a side channel present in all of the major AI assistants, with the exception of Google Gemini. It then refines the fairly raw results through large language models specially trained for the task. The result: Someone with a passive adversary-in-the-middle position—meaning an adversary who can monitor the data packets passing between an AI assistant and the user—can infer the specific topic of 55 percent of all captured responses, usually with high word accuracy. The attack can deduce responses with perfect word accuracy 29 percent of the time.

    Token privacy

    “Currently, anybody can read private chats sent from ChatGPT and other services,” Yisroel Mirsky, head of the Offensive AI Research Lab at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, wrote in an email. “This includes malicious actors on the same Wi-Fi or LAN as a client (e.g., same coffee shop), or even a malicious actor on the Internet—anyone who can observe the traffic. The attack is passive and can happen without OpenAI or their client's knowledge. OpenAI encrypts their traffic to prevent these kinds of eavesdropping attacks, but our research shows that the way OpenAI is using encryption is flawed, and thus the content of the messages are exposed.”

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      Phantom Parrot review – cautionary tale of state surveillance and the war on privacy

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 12 March - 11:00

    A compelling documentary on digital war-on-terror laws that centres on a programme that can mean prison for anyone who refuses UK police access to their smartphones

    We all know (and are largely complacent) about the limitless possibilities for digital surveillance and data collection by corporations intent on selling us things, or using our existence to sell advertising. Kate Stonehill’s film is about the more old-fashioned subject of state surveillance and specifically the existence of a disquieting new programme in the UK nicknamed “Phantom Parrot”: the practice of remote spying on mobile phone use.

    Stonehill’s film is also about schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act , which gives the police powers to search people at UK borders, without needing explicit grounds for suspicion on terrorism. That legislation was brought in before the smartphone was invented, but means that officers can demand detainees hand over their PINs and passcodes to all devices on pain of prosecution and a three-month prison sentence. Because, for all that almost all the information exists on external servers and the cloud, there are still some things which are only held on this handset, to which most of us entrust our entire existence.

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